When Matt asked about the contents of New Waves in Philosophy of Science, I was unable to turn up anything helpful on-line. So I just cut and pasted the table of contents.

Turns out that I had only looked on the publisher's US website and in the Amazon listing for the book. I have since discovered Palgrave UK's page for the volume, which has the list of articles. From there you can download a PDF of the frontmatter, our editorial introduction, and the index. (The link says 'Download sample chapter.')

We often assess claims based on plausibility of style and content. In writing about Wikipedia, I argue that these assessments can be frustrated by community editing. The implausible details can be taken out of false accounts, making the falsity harder to detect. Some people respond to my argument by denying that this happens.

Reading Eugenie Samuel Reich's Plastic Fantastic, I bumped into a similar phenomenon. Reich is a science journalist, and the book is about fraudulent science. Her claim is that peer review does not do an especially good job of catching deliberate fabrication. Moreover, scientists who perpetrate fraud often exploit reviewers' comments and questions in order to make their fabrications more plausible. Reich writes:

Not only in there no guarantee that a thorough review process will detect a false claim, but even more disturbingly, a thorough review may do little more than reveal to authors what changes they need to make in order to turn a false claim into a more plausible scam.[p. 122]

The parallel with Wikipedia is not precise, but in both cases conscientious but imperfect editorial oversight results in public versions which are more plausible false accounts than the original submissions.

Scammer scientists exploiting this can publish more plausible scam papers than they could have otherwise. Yet one might hope that, although this helps fraudulent papers on the timescale of months, fraudulent research programs will still be uncovered in the course of just a couple of years. The parallel hope for the Wikipedia is that false claims will be corrected eventually.

So the hope is that fraud burns brighter by exploiting peer review but will still burn out in relatively short order. Consistent with this is the fact that none of the cases of fraud which Reich describes have gone undetected for more than a few years, and each was discovered in time to ruin the scientists responsible. Yet that may just be because she can only report scientific fraud which was ultimately detected.

Charles Sander Peirce observed that it's a poor bet to insist that science will never be able to solve some question. Make the bet, he says, and

[t]he likelihood is that it will be solved long before you could have dreamed possible. Think of Auguste Comte who when asked to name any thing that could never be found out instanced the chemical composition of the fixed stars; and almost before his book became known to the world at large, the first steps had been taken in spectral analysis.*

Yet there are certainly some questions we won't be able to solve. The problem, of course, is identifying which facts those are.

Traces of the past have been effaced, and so there are some facts about what the past was like that are unrecoverable. In explaining underdetermination to people, I use the colour of dinosaurs as an example. It may just be that the fossil record has not preserved enough for us to figure it out.

And yet researchers claim to figure it out based on microscopic bits responsible for extruding pigment; see the NYTimes article. The Sinosauropteryx, we are told, had "had a head-to-tail feathered mohawk in a subdued palette of chestnut and white stripes."

The story goes on to indicate that other scientists challenge the result, that the data set is small, and so on. And I only ever used the example in a conditional way, to say that the relevant evidence might not exist in the fossil record. I only meant say that this kind of underdetermination will arise in historical sciences. Of course we can't know with certainty which questions will be underdeterminated in this way.

My copy of Philosophy of Science* arrived today, and I've just read Ingemar Nordin's "Technology and Goodman's Paradox." The central claim of the article is that the problem of induction is primarily an issue about whether or not to believe theories and so does not arise for reliance on techniques. Nordin ultimately suggests that - given the choice between two techniques - we should rely on the one that has the longest track record of working for us in the past.

I'm going to suggest: Either (A) Nordin's solution works for theories, too; or (B) the solution doesn't work for techniques. In either case, the problem of induction is as much a problem for technology as it is for theory.

A. Nordin's suggestion that we should rely on our most longstanding techniques is a lot like Goodman's own suggestion about predicates. Goodman suggests we generalize using 'green' rather than 'grue' because the former is entrenched. Of course, this doesn't justify our use of 'green' in any transcendent sense. If our forebears had used gruesome vocabulary, then 'grue' would be the entrenched predicate.**

But Nordin wants to say that relying on an entrenched technique is rational, whereas generalizing using an entrenched predicate is not. This requires a distinction between theories (which are confirmed) and techniques (which are relied upon). Indeed, Nordin tells us that a theory "is of course a linguistic entity that is capable of having a truth value" (p. 347). This presumes what used to be called the Received View of theories, that they are linguistic entities which have truth values. It is no longer received, not a consensus, and arguably only the minority view now. But it does yield a sharp distinction between theories (which are for believing) and techniques (which are for using).

Suppose instead that a theory is a set of resources for building models. In a paper, I call this the 'toolbox theory' concept. On this view, theories are not distinct from techniques. Instead, theories just are techniques of a particular kind. Nordin ultimately advocates something similar, writing "that from a technological point of view scientific theories should be treated as tools; as instruments for construction of techniques" [p. 352].*** If we adopt the toolbox theory concept, then any principled reason to use entrenched techniques should also be a reason to use entrenched predicates.

B. Nordin only forms grue-like alternatives to theories understood as statements. So, regarding some technique T, he opposes claims like "T works" to grue-like rivals like "T works before January 2011, but does not work afterwards." (Typing that, it makes me think that the warranty on T must run out at the end of 2010.) But we can consider gruesome techniques, too.

Suppose that I have consistently used the technique hit it with a hammer and that this has worked out for me so far. Nordin would suggest that it would be rational for me to keep hitting it with a hammer in future cases. However, how I am I supposed to know that my technique in those previous instances was to hit it with a hammer rather than to hit it with a hammer if before January 2011, but stab it with a screwdriver afterwards?

Either I have a description of my technique in mind or I do not. If I do, then we are back in with predicates. I am thinking of this as a 'hammer' rather than a 'hamdriver', and it is green vs. grue all over again. If I do not, it's not clear what distinguishes future applications of this technique from applications of different techniques. I carry on doing what I'm doing, whatever that is.

To sum up: There isn't any fault along which to separate the theoretical problem of induction from the practical problem of induction. If it's a problem, then it's a problem on both sides of the line. Theories are techniques, but techniques are also theoretical.

* v 76, n 3, July 2009. Is the journal still this far behind, or am I just getting it late?** Note that relying on entrenched techniques leads down the same road as relying on entrenched predicates; cf. p. 353. If our forebears had long used odd techniques, then they would now be entrenched. In fact, our forebears did use lots of odd techniques. Somebody did something quirky and things went well, the quirky thing became common practice, and it became the thing that people had always done. We call these superstitions.*** Nordin's suggestion is different than the toolbox view in two respects. First, he says it only holds "from a technological point of view." Second, he sees theories as tools for constructing techniques rather than for constructing models.

Matt asks about the contents of the recently released New Waves in Philosophy of Science. Amazon has a preview for other books in the series, but not this one yet. I'm sure it will in due time, but here's the list of contributions anyway:

1. Juha Saatsi, Form vs. Content-driven Arguments for Realism2. Sherri Roush, Optimism about the Pessimistic Induction3. Anjan Chakravartty, Metaphysics Between the Sciences and Philosophies of Science4. Jessica Pfeifer, Nominalism and Inductive Generalizations5. Otavio Bueno, Models and Scientific Representations6. Greg Frost-Arnold and P.D. Magnus, The Identical Rivals Response to Underdetermination7. Laura Perini, Scientific Representation and the Semiotics of Pictures8. Jay Odenbaugh, Philosophy of the Environmental Sciences9. Justin Biddle and Eric Winsberg, Value Judgments and the Estimation of Uncertainty in Climate Modeling10. Kristen Intemann, Feminist Standpoint Empiricism: Rethinking the Terrain in Feminist Philosophy of Science11. Daniel Steel, Naturalism and the Enlightenment Ideal: Rethinking a Central Debate in the Philosophy of Social Science12. Michael Weisberg, New Approaches to the Division of Cognitive Labor